This book was one of a series on current history based on a long-standing relationship that the author enjoyed with a once-leading U.S. publisher, Scribners. These studies, emphasizing a racialist-eugenicist perspective, gave (Theodore) Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950), who was already a prolific contributor to journals on contemporary issues, access to a world-wide audience. Influenced by Madison Grant, William Z. Ripley, and the Frenchman, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Stoddard confidently reiterated that inherent qualities of particular races held the key to the historical development of modern nations and whole continents. Here, he believed, could modern science make an effective contribution to an understanding of social and political relationships. In this particular volume, Stoddard focused on Europe as it was recovering nearly 6 years after the conclusion of the Great War in 1918, with a logical emphasis on basic divisions of the white race. These racial lines, he stressed, crossed national boundaries within which dwelt a nearly pure race, various admixtures, or two or more white stocks relatively separated by geographical barriers. Political boundaries were usually contrived, and when not following topographical barriers, relatively artificial. These contrivances were all too common in the nations fashioned out of the defeated empires at Versailles.

Almost a half-century later, John R. Baker, writing in Race (1974), his magnum opus, described Stoddard--with whom he actually held a few points of agreement--as a far inferior writer on the "ethnic problem" and essentially a journalist. Actually, Stoddard held a distinguished resume based on a degree in law and a doctorate in history from Harvard. He deliberately channeled his activities towards a lay audience and avoided academic jargon although there is something of the dilettante in his writing style.

While his books are generally very readable, those who peruse Stoddard might agree in measure with Baker, and question whether his methodology is sound. He could be faulted, given his basic premises, for clinging to the outmoded Nordic-Alpine-Mediterranean "trilogy" of white sub-subspecies championed by Ripley (who had used Teutonic in place of Nordic) at the end of the 19th century and assigning a suite of character traits to each one. Since he continued to focus on inherent intelligence as indispensable for the creation and sustaining of civilizations, better it would have been to attempt to isolate this one factor in his review of European problems--as students of race and ethnicity such as Baker himself, Arthur Jensen, Hans Eysenck, Richard Herrnstein tried to do further along--than to engage in extended discussion of less measurable characteristics that had the danger of degenerating into highly subjective speculation. In lists of notables of particular countries (based at least on portraits) there were at least the beginnings of a rudimentary study. This approach would be particularly suitable for France, where the trilogy was well established.

With respect to white intra-racial distinctions, during the later 1920's, Earnest A. Hooton and Carleton S. Coon (who lived and worked nearby), along with continental anthropologists earlier, were developing a more sophisticated multi-type conception of white racial categories, of which Stoddard was apparently unaware. Further, in his conception of the broader categories of race, as evidenced in earlier books, he overplayed the concept of "color," assuming that the peoples of the Indian sub-continent, many of whom are dark skinned, were necessarily non-white and misidentifying the Australoids as Negroes.

The Anglo-French writer Hilaire Belloc once caricatured the Nordic-Alpine-Mediterranean schema, but Stoddard had never put it in those terms:

I

Behold, my child, the Nordic man,

And be as like him, as you can;

His legs are long, his mind is slow,

His hair is lank and made of tow.

II

And here we have the Alpine Race:

Oh! What a broad and foolish face!

His skin is of a dirty yellow.

He is a most unpleasant fellow.

III

The most degraded of them all

Mediterranean we call.

His hair is crisp, and even curls,

And he is saucy with the girls [cited, for example, in Coon, Races of Europe, p. 284 ]

Tongue in cheek! Stoddard thought highly of the artistic creativity of Mediterraneans, and looking back at antiquity identified them as the founders of the pre-Roman civilizations that were glory of the Inland Sea, from which this dark-eyed and often dark complected branch of whites received its name. On the negative side, they were inherently emotional and could only obey stern, dynamic leaders, but just so long as such natural leaders remained alive. The round-skulled Alpines, who occupied a long central region across Europe to Asia, had the virtues of stolidity and obedience, if they were not as creative. They generally shunned migration by sea or lightning advances on land, moving gradually over the ages, more like glaciers.

The Nordics, skeletally, were not so different from the Mediterraneans, but light complected, having a high frequency of blond hair, and far from being dull witted, were highly intelligent and curious. The superior of the three--for Stoddard dealt liberally in superiority and inferiority: Nordics explored and migrated far and wide, rose to distinction in combat, led in fields of scientific inquiry, and became captains of industry as the industrial revolution unfolded in the 19th century. Over the other races, whether white or colored, they ruled as aristocrats. Among their own kind they had a talent for living under a democratic, parliamentary system (v. particularly, pp. 5-27).

Racial Realities in Europe, given its particular grounding, should be seen as an episode in the history of ideas and evaluated in that context, as will be attempted here. Even the author admitted that his was a pioneering venture, more of a sketch, and he was making "no pretension" to completeness or finality (v. Foreword). From this realistic perspective, a careful reader will be surprised by the reasonable descriptions and the accurate forecasting of which Stoddard was capable, and intrigued by the stereotypes of particular nationalities (based on their specific racial composition) that were standard nearly a century ago and lingered on until the last decades of the 20th century.

Consider the opening chapters on "Kindred English," the Scandinavians, the "Composite" French, the Mediterranean South and the "Alpinized" Germans. As an old-stock Yankee American, it would have been surprising if Stoddard did not see how close were the ties that bound the new nation to the old homeland of most of its colonists, but he stressed that for the majority of Americans these were not just cultural legacies, but evidence of a common inheritance that was fundamentally Nordic. Thus in the early 20th century, an American and an Englishman, whatever their differences in an argument, could put these disagreements in perspective, perhaps even imperceptively, and politely agree to disagree. Both peoples had an innate sense of coolness and common sense that would established their rapport: "Not for nothing are we both mainly Nordic in blood! [p. 49]"

The choice of "mainly Nordic" meant that Stoddard was aware of another element in the British Isles. He contended that the original population, later supplemented by the Kelts, was Mediterranean and that there were notable Mediterranean survivals on the western side of the islands, such as in Wales, the west of Scotland, and in Ireland. (He had little to say about any Roman contributions to the racial makeup of Britannia.) Elsewhere, there had been harmonious mixtures of this stock with what he saw as the post-Roman Nordic immigrants--the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes and other Scandinavians, and ultimately, the Normans. This Mediterranean undertone in England and elsewhere in the Isles (the Alpine being comparatively absent) gave sparks of imagination and artistic impulse to the dynamic and dominant Nordic element.

A perusal of the work of later anthropologists would reveal some truth in Stoddard's observations, but cast into the shadows his conception of the pre-Roman Keltic invaders as Mediterraneans. Coon and Baker emphasized that the Kelts were also basically Nordic, but more brown- than blond-haired. The survival of Keltic speech in some of the western corners of Britain simply revealed that the Kelts, before they in turn gave ground and intermixed with the later, blonder Nordics, had imparted their speech to an older population. Coon suggested that very early Mediterraneans, arriving sporadically before the great era of Mediterranean expansion during the Neolithic Age, shared the British Isles with a white aboriginal hunting and fishing population, derived from Cromagnon Man, with possible traces of Neanderthal admixture. These "Paleolithic" whites were more prevalent in Ireland.

A reader at least superficially acquainted with British history could detect some puzzles, for it would seem that the warrior qualities of the Nordic would undercut the apparently ability to create stable institutions. One can only consider--among many episodes--Wat Tyler's peasant rebellion of the 14th century, the Wars of the Roses a century later, the tyrannical rule of Henry VIII, and the deposition and decapitation of King Charles I at the behest of Oliver Cromwell and his confederates. However, giving Stoddard the benefit of the doubt based on his overall narrative, he emphasizes the record after the industrial revolution had set in only a slightly more than a century before he started to write. The population expanded rapidly, abandoning the shrinking farmlands for factories and life in overcrowded cities, yet Britain, as it became the center of the world's greatest empire, did not experience the violent political upheavals one might have imagined elsewhere. British statesmen perfected the art of compromise, expanded the electorate, and introduced some welfare measures.

Stoddard doubted that the British laboring classes would bother to imitate the Communist revolution that had only recently taken place in Russia, reporting that even among the most radical and pro-"Bolshevist" of the newly arisen Labor Party there was skepticism about the interest of the average workingman in abandoning the familiar comforts of the local pub and rushing into the streets to proclaim the dictatorship of the proletariat (pp. 38-39).

Financial and economic challenges aplenty faced the British Empire not only as a result of the Great War, but going back generations before as other nations developed the mass-production of industrial capitalism and cut into Britain's lead. By the mid-1870's, its balance of trade was no longer favorable, and support for the population remaining in the home islands was becoming increasingly difficult. The war had eased the employment problem as millions of young men marched to the front, and those able-bodied, but staying behind, found work in factories turning out materiel for the war effort. But this was a temporary fix, being based on the imposition of high taxes and the issuing of war loans that had to be repaid, while returning survivors from the battlefields of France and Flanders needed and expected employment.

Stoddard was very cautiously optimistic that English statesmen could find a solution in the revival of world trade and promoting the restoration of markets in Europe, to include the former foe, Germany, and the now hostile Russia. Allowing Germany to recover economically put England at odds with France, which feared a German rebirth, and it haunted Anglo-French relations after the Versailles Treaty. Stoddard was keenly aware of this development, but believed this was the only viable alternative and it only underscored "British coolness and common sense [p. 45]."

Somehow, Stoddard had the knack of compiling his books a little prematurely. Had he waited, he would have been able to study the General Strike of 1926, which pitted workers against the middle and upper classes, and though it subsided after a few days, undoubtedly heralded the triumph of the Labor Party and downfall of Winston Churchill in a Britain weary from a second great war that began hardly a generation later. There are other examples of Stoddard being a bit early, as we shall see.

Moving to the immediate east, Stoddard takes the reader to "The Nordic North" of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden (with Finland sometimes linked to the latter). Here, unlike Britain, there were no Mediterranean traces and only a few secluded Alpine settlements going back to pre-antiquity. (As Coon would demonstrate in his Races of Europe [1939]), Stoddard had no insight into the the widespread "Northern" but not actually Nordic population in the region.) The almost purely Nordic Scandinavians had learned to calmly settle their differences and rivalries through arbitration or mutual agreement and were not acting as the berserkers of old legends or the successful soldiers they were well into the 18th century.

As in Britain, Nordic intelligence gradually took the lead over the wasteful militarism of this race and enabled these nations, once very nearly marginalized, to make the best possible use of those resources that nature had bestowed. Denmark carefully exploited its available farm land for domestic consumption and the export of high-grade dairy products, Norway turned to tourism, using its rugged fjords to good advantage, and expansion of its fisheries, while Sweden became a producer of iron and steel, and both countries increasingly benefited from hydro-electric power based on their abundant fast-moving streams and waterfalls. Stoddard added that there was a growing appreciation of the role of race in these Nordic lands, without elaborating on the eugenics measures that these nations were to implement. "Certainly," he concluded, "Scandinavia is to-day the brightest spot on the continent of Europe [v. p. 70]."

This favorable portrait of Scandinavia found its echo in the post World War II period when the liberal-left in the United States frequently pointed to Norway and Sweden as examples of welfare states that were comparatively industrious and prosperous, and did not blunt initiative as conservatives of the era would argue. Frequently missing in the post-1945 commentary was mention of the comparative white racial unity of Scandinavia at the time and the emphasis on eugenics, something Stoddard would have been quick to stress. Most likely, as a moderate or more conservative Progressive, he would not have liked its welfarism.

"Composite France" aptly summarized Stoddard's observation that France lacked the racial harmony of Britain and the overwhelming Nordic racial presence of Europe's North. That France was a nation was incontestable: the French were unquestionably patriotic in the aftermath of the Great War, and they lived under a centralized government. However, France was "a good example of national, as distinguished from racial, unity [v p. 72]." Its nationality was a state of mind, while the ebb and flow of its racial elements, where the Nordic-Alpine-Mediterranean triad had been a reality of long standing, made French politics far more unstable than those of Britain and Scandinavia. Thus, French politicians such Georges Clemenceau insisted that centralization, whatever its drawbacks, was necessary to maintain unity, otherwise "France might well be lost [p. 74]."

Geography abetted the racial disharmonics of France. Three parallel zones of plains and valleys in the North, rugged and barren mountains and hill-country stretching across the center of the country, and a flatter topography in the South roughly similar to the North precluded widespread blending of the racial trilogy, even though river valleys running north to south cut corridors through the east-west zones. The racial situation resembled that existing in Caesar's day, with Nordics dominating in the North, Alpines in the center, and Mediterraneans in the south.

Something unprecedented, however, was occurring in contemporary France as the mostly passive Alpine element, since antiquity the mainstay of its peasant population, was gaining national power over the Nordics and Mediterraneans--particularly over the former, who had dominated France for more than a thousand years after the Roman Empire disappeared in the West. Nordics, augmented by some Mediterranean admixture, gave France a dash of individualism, but, with the French Revolution as a turning point, their role as the buttress of aristocracy and talent went into decline--many going to the guillotine, abetted by the continual fighting from the Wars of the Revolution through the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which spilled much Nordic blood. The genius of the Nordics and Mediterraneans continued to flicker in the France that emerged in scientific inquiry (mainly Nordic) and literature (honors shared by both races).

The rise of the Alpine, with the ingrained social conservatism attributed to this race, was not without some value, because it maintained the rural basis of French life and left France much more self-sufficient economically and less dependent on imports of food for survival as the much more dynamic and industrialized Britain. The World War disrupted this comparative economic stability, destroying the flower of French manhood and literally depopulating the country--the losses not really compensated by the acquisition of Alsace-Lorraine. The decimation of the current generation must have borne by Alpines as well as Nordics, but Stoddard assumes that the latter suffered the greater share of losses. He provides no reliable accounting of the actual racial composition of the dead and maimed of 1914-1918; only stating that the losses would take a long time to make up given the chronically low French birthrate. Perhaps one could assume that the Nordics in their enthusiasm for heroic combat threw themselves blindly at the German fortifications in Alsace-Lorraine in their disastrous reverse of 1914, while the Alpines bled slowly but surely in the prolonged tedium of trench warfare, or the siege of Verdun.

In assessing the prospects open to post-war France, Stoddard seems to fall away from a racial underpinning of events and provides useful commentary that others with a different world-view undoubtedly made at the time. Financially, the war placed France in a precarious position: faced as it was with crushing debts, the government resorted to credit and currency inflation and had abstained, until only very recently, from imposing higher taxes--a more realistic but obviously painful step to which Britain resorted. France was a paradox; seemingly it had taken mastery of the European continent from Germany, had the finest and largest army in Europe, and surrounded the vanquished foe with new allies created from the Empires abolished at Versailles. France also had the second largest empire in the world, second only to that of Britain, and controlled it much more forcefully, with scant room for autonomy. To the alarm of fellow victors, Italy and Britain, French generals made no effort to conceal their desire to recruit non-white soldiers from the Empire to garrison France to supplement the short-fall in soldiers stemming from the war and the falling birthrate.

Summarizing the French predicament of the early 1920's, Stoddard quoted a certain "clever" French diplomat: "...It's just about what it was at the height of Napoleon's power--outwardly brilliant, inwardly dangerous [v. p. 92]." Returning to his racial theories as he concluded, Stoddard wondered whether the Alpine race, which had risen ahead of the Nordics and Mediterraneans in France, could lead a great empire, for Alpines had never shown much talent for empire building. Regrettably, he did not offer an updated edition of this book to cover the 1930's or the next war. Did the defensive strategy of the Maginot line, the lack of innovation in tactics, and the rise of the appeasers underscore the salient traits of the Alpine? Was Free France leader, Charles deGaulle, tall as he was and from the north of his country, a racial Nordic (though far from blond)?

Stoddard, continuing his discourse, places Italy, Spain, and Portugal in the Mediterranean south, but warns the reader that these legatees of Rome are misleadingly referred to as "Latin" nations. Their languages were derived from the speech of Roman conquerors, but the early Romans were a Nordic-Alpine blend. What seemingly binds them is the larger presence of the Mediterranean race, more in evidence than in their northern neighbor France, where this component in any substantial number is concentrated in the south. In southern Italy, southern Spain, and most of Portugal, the Mediterranean race, creative as well as temperamental in its purity, had become adulterated with low-quality, even "inferior," strains from Africa and the Levant. Observing the region through his contemporary lense, Italy, in contrast, to Spain and Portugal, was now renacent, as it periodically had been, due to its northern population, which retained the best of the Mediterranean and, thanks to invasions and infiltrations, also enjoyed a Nordic presence, blended with Alpines. Stoddard overlooked the presence of Alpines and Nordics in Sicily and the southern half of the "Boot."

Italy, despite the progressive trend of its northern half, was late to acquire its national unity, and, based on its racial makeup, ill-served by parliamentary democracy. The latter shortcoming was particularly evident after the war, when exhausted Italy seemed on the "verge of chaos." Stoddard could scarcely contain adolescent emotions when he extolled the next development--"Then came--Fascismo! [p. 107]" Here was a realistic doctrine that, frankly dictatorial, was bent on developing political institutions better suited to a mixed population in which pure Nordics were in the minority. Stoddard, who indicated he went directly to the sources of the new movement and interviewed its leaders--we should assume Mussolini himself--found the emotional and idealistic side of Fascism refreshing, for representatives of the new regime insisted that Italy would not rest on its fabulous laurels of Rome, Caesar, Dante, or the recent rise to national unity, but create new achievements that were the proper measure of a country. As a "leading Fascist" informed him, Italian greatness will rest on what the living Italians "are, do, and will do [p. 111]."

Italy's neighbors in the Iberian peninsula to its west, inspired much less enthusiasm in Stoddard. These nations were much more technically Mediterranean in stock than Italy--despite notable infusions of Nordic blood that created ruling aristocracies, such as the Iberian Visigothic kingdom--but had become "racially impoverished." In Spain, the best Mediterraneans and, of course, the once substantial Nordic stratum were expended in the conquest of the New World and protracted wars in Europe. However, wars were only one dysgenic agent in Spanish history. Rather than blame any Moorish or even Jewish influences for Spain's fall from the commanding heights of the 16th and early 17th centuries, Stoddard faults, by implication (not being as pointedly anti-Catholic as Grant), the Roman Church, which with its monasticism, sent valuable racial elements into convents and monasteries, where they could not procreate and, for those who had minds that questioned religious orthodoxy, subjected them to imprisonment, or exiled or killed them by burning in the ruthless intolerance of the Inquisition. That its victims initially were Jews and remnants of the defeated Moors is unmentioned.

As Spain lost its Empire, its internal politics, an unsuitable imitation of parliamentary and bureaucratic governance, became increasingly chaotic and a playing field for political gangs greedy for the spoils of the treasury. Recently, Spain had become a dictatorship under Miguel Primo de Rivera, but Stoddard was disinclined to make any comparison with Mussolini and Fascism, a genuine mass movement; de Rivera simply led a military revolt, and there had been many in Spanish history.

In Portugal, the flame of grandeur burned out even more quickly than in Spain. One reason: the oft-repeated burden of empire in draining a nation, which Stoddard judged to be even more purely Mediterranean historically than Spain, of its best blood for service as sailors and soldiers. However, there occurred something even more fateful and toxic than the intrusion of Moorish strains, monasticism, or the Inquisition: the imposition of Negro slavery into the semi-tropical south of this small strip of Iberia. "In time," observed Stoddard, "the population of Southern Portugal became tinged with negro blood, which produced a depressing and degrading effect on the national character [p. 121]."

Yet, as a nation, the fate of Portugal resembled that of neighbor Spain, which lacked this degree of hybridization with the African Negro. Disorderly politics, the overthrow of the monarchy, and its replacement with the even more turbulent Portuguese Republic gave ample evidence of a Central American failed state of the era: "From present-day Portugal the world has apparently either little to expect or to hope [v. ibid.]" Certainly, corroboration of the dire financial situation of Portugal, came from many contemporary sources, and not merely those who sought to apply a racialist perspective.

History gradually imposed a later word on the bleak Iberian and glowing Fascist portraiture of Stoddard. Had he waited a couple of years, and provided an update, he would have witnessed a dramatic change in the fortunes of Portugal, where the military coup of May 1926 gradually established the Estado Novo or New State to be managed by the finance minister--and ultimately head of state--Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. Salazar, solid Mediterranean that he was, stabilized the currency and applied Catholic social teaching to create this New State that kept out of the spotlight for decades and offered a measure of progress for this sea-faring land. The credits and debits due to this undoubtedly very honorable and humbitious man in his efforts to improve the lot of his countrymen have received comparatively little attention in recent years.

Ten years later, Salazar came to the aid of fellow Iberian and Mediterranean, General Francisco Franco, who had cautiously assumed the leadership of a Nationalist coalition that aimed to overthrow the Second Republic (established 1931 as King Alfonso XIII abdicated ) that was increasingly turning to the Left. Salazar supported Franco with volunteers, but ultimately the Franquist revolution became more controversial because it did not enjoy the acceptance or popularity of Portugal's 1926 upheaval, and its victory could only be assured by triumph in a protracted and bloody Civil War. What aid Salazar could provide was considerably outweighed by the direct military assistance provided the Nationalists by Germany (much discussed) and Italy, much more substantial and costly, not only in terms of absolute numbers in soldiers and war materiel, but with respect to the state of Italy's finances. Historians have debated whether reverses suffered by the Italian Expeditionary Force at Guadalajara in 1937, while attempting to encircle Madrid, portended Italy's ill-fortune as a German ally a few years later. Certainly, the setback was a blow to Mussolini's reputation.

At the helm of Spain by early 1939, Franco displayed the shrewdness necessary for Spain's survival as an independent nation by ultimately staying out of the Second World War as an Axis partner. The Iberian authoritarian regimes, with similar panoply but less flamboyance than Fascismo, persevered well into the post-war years, while Mussolini, highly praised not only by Stoddard but by many in America and England in the 1920's, became the "Sawdust Caesar" who perished in grisly fashion just a few days before his fellow dictator, Adolf Hitler.

In view of the fact that Stoddard's racialist views accorded him a following in Germany that ultimately led the Fuhrer to receive him for an audience, briefly described in his Out of the Darkness (1940), the chapter on "Alpinized Germany" offers readers some surprises. Stoddard debunks the Nordic myth of pre-war German nationalism--which misused the new science of anthropology--and describes contemporary Germany as far more Alpine, with some Nordic infusion, particularly in its upper classes. The only genuinely Nordic areas that remained were in the German far north and northwest. Originally, the Germanic peoples under Charlemagne and the later medieval Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire retained to a far greater degree their Nordic racial lineage going back to antiquity. But the usual Nordic propensity for warfare and destructive rivalries, and a costly and continual involvement in the Italian peninsula opened up large areas in the east and center of old Germania to Slavic, i.e., Alpine penetration. Even the German "drive to the East" of the later Middle Ages to regain lands lost to the Slavs only temporarily--anthropologically speaking--prevented amalgamation with this Alpine element.

A fine, still mostly Nordic culture of knights, splendid castles, artisans, and a caste of gentlemen still survived for centuries, but suffered its greatest setback in the Thirty Years War of the first half of 17th century. Religious fanaticism helped fuel an intranecine butchery, and foreign armies entered the fray to fight out their rivalries on Germanic soil. The Nordic stock of Germany was "hideously" mutilated, with ramifications on many levels. Stoddard scathingly lamented what he saw as the loss of the old Nordic gentlemanly type: "The tactlessness and lack of innate courtesy characteristic of modern Germans seems mainly due to this scarcity of 'gentle' blood [p. 134]." Concomitantly, a further shrinkage of the Nordic race in favor of the more enduring but less talented Alpine transpired, accompanied by much more intermarriage between Nordics and Alpines with a blurring of old racial lines. The inherent submissiveness of the Alpine led to a trait of docile obedience and a subordination to "strong, masterful minorities....[p. 144]"

Here and elsewhere Stoddard gives us a premonition of the rise of National Socialism and its hold over the German masses. In the preparation of this book he was undoubtedly aware of Hitler's abortive Munich "beer-hall" putsch of November 1923. As Stoddard wrote, the re-born united Germany, the "Second Reich" of Bismarck and the Hohenzollern dynasty, once proud and boastful and enjoying unprecedented prosperity, was licking its wounds after the costly Versailles Treaty and its loss of full sovereignty. But a coarsely built German industrialist--Stoddard suggesting he was one of the growing population of non-Nordics--confided that Germany would rebound: the tribulations of the present were only " a process of ruthless selection" that was building a hardier stock [v. p. 143].

Germans were confident that ultimately, one way or another, they would remove the Versailles restrictions and regain complete independence. Completing his chapter, Stoddard believed that this Alpine-Nordic mixture that survived the war, less individualistic than the purer Nordics of centuries past, had the Alpine's dogged willingness to obey a political master class. "That," he concluded, "was the secret of Imperial Germany's disciplined power before and during the late war. The chances are that a similar regime in Germany will ultimately arise [p.144]."

Finishing with Germany, Stoddard moves further to the east, along the Danubian basin, and then to Eastern Europe and the Balkans. By this time, most of his racial characterizations are well worn, but his observations concerning the aftermath of Versailles and its associated treaties, which birthed new nation states, re-created an old one--Poland, and readjusted numerous frontiers are informative. Consider that the Danubian basin, on the east mountainous, but a plain in its west, would logically constitute the living space for one people or two peoples living in a natural symbiosis; and ultimately this potential found expression in the Austro-Hungarian "Dual Monarchy" derived from the Germanic Habsburgs streaming down the mountains in the great German drive to the east and Magyars (Hungarians) coming westward to settle on the Danubian plain, reminiscent of their Far Eastern homeland. Originally Asiatic, the Magyars had become mostly European physically via the absorption of Nordics and Alpines; but their speech and collective memory remained.

The Habsburg Dynasty initially kept apart from the Magyar Kingdom; the two nations (each based on racial mixtures) drew a clear boundary between themselves at the point where the Danube, flowing down from the mountains, reaches the plains. However, Hungary fell under the dominion of the Ottoman Turks following "a great battle" (actually Mohacs, 1526). In pushing the Turks back, the Germanic Habsburgs conquered the Hungarian homeland, and some of the Ottomans' Balkan acquisitions. Though resenting their new Germanic overlords, the Hungarians, and ultimately all the various races that the Hapsburg Empire eventually conquered or drew into its borders, benefited economically from a logical arrangement that stemmed from the interdependence of the greater Danubian area.

Composed of the three European races, plus dashes of others that remained in the Magyar horde, the Hapsburg Monarchy had to contend with the fusion of these races into "nationalities" united less by race than by a common language and a sense of common history. In fact, by the 19th century, the domain of the Monarchy was like a dinosaur held together chiefly by allegiance to its Caesars: this loyalty was strong among the German-speaking Viennese and also in the South Tyrol, but the burgeoning force of nationalism contagiously spread among the myriad nationalities now within its domain--the Hungarians themselves, the various South Slavs, Czechs, Slovaks, the Romanians of Transylvania, and Poles and "Ruthenians." Stoddard seemed to take no notice of Ukrainians, who are not even mentioned in the book, and are evidently folded into the Ruthenians. The Hungarians received the only major concession made to a distinct nationality: in 1867 they became in theory co-equals of the Austrians, and the name of the Empire was officially changed to Austria-Hungary.

By this point, it is overwhelmingly clear that Stoddard would have been better off to have entitled his book National and Racial Realities in Europe. At the outset, he admitted that nations were the building blocks of modern history, and with the possible exception of Northern Europe, were all composite, differing perhaps in some levels of cohesion and blending. While a race, such as the Nordic type or the Mediterranean, could be used at times to prop up the myths and legends of these nationalities, Stoddard's discourse makes it clear that a common allegiance based on a shared language and history was even more crucial. And one could appropriately ask by this time--was there ever an explicitly Alpine nationalism? Or (to cite a racial designation Stoddard declined to use, but should have known about) a binding "Dinaric" self-consciousness? If so, it would have linked some of the German-speaking Austrians to many of their subjects in the Balkans.

Where Stoddard provides some constructive observations is in his assessment of the crucial failure of the the 1918 Victors' peace in the Danubian area. The imposed settlements (actually St. Germain and Trianon) terribly disrupted a potentially harmonious economic union, creating a quilt of unrealistic independent nation-states:

"That geographic unity, the Danube basin, has been slashed by a network of frontiers which are not merely fortified political borders...but are also tariff walls that strangle trade and kill prosperity. Raw materials are cut off from their factories, factories are cut off from their natural markets, rich harvests are kept from starving cities; yet so fanatically jealous are the new nations from one another that they are ready to keep themselves poor if they can thereby prevent their neighbors from growing rich [pp. 156-57]."

The architects of the new European order could have at least considered constructing a loose federation bound by trade. Possibly, the glum and adrift Austrians, bereft of their imperial heritage would return to a limited union with Hungary. Regarding Austria, in contrast to his rather remarkable predictions about Germany, Stoddard could make no clear forecast, but saw good eventual chances for Austrians to join their fellow German-speakers across the Inn river, despite Germans being somewhat racially distinct from them. The situation was "fluid," Stoddard commented, but ultimately decided (for a spell) by absorption into the Third Reich in 1938.

Hungarians differed from Austrians postwar in keeping their venerable national pride intact. Being a distinct nationality for so long, they had not received the shock the Austrians experienced in losing the Habsburgs and the accompanying prestige and uniquely charming atmosphere Stoddard and others could sense in Vienna on the eve of the Great War. He writes admiringly of the Hungarians despite their mixed origins, again departing from his attempt to fuse historical trends to a scientific racial analysis. Openly, he praises a "nation," not a race: "The fierce, warlike blood of their nomad ancestors still runs hot in their veins....[p. 164]" Hungarians, whether rich or poor, had resolved never to accept the incorporation of large portions of their population and swaths of their territory into the new countries along their borders. But, with skeletal armed forces in the wake of the imposed treaties of the victors, Hungarians knew they had to wait. They would find the time to move as Hitler-Germany became more powerful in the late 1930's, Stoddard forecasting that "some sudden shift in European politics may give Hungary her chance of revenge."

Stoddard finished his survey of peoples and conditions in Europe with a review of "The Alpine East" and the Balkans. His comments are often astute and prophetic, but the chapter reveals with stunning clarity the flaws of his anthropological methodology. Most erroneous is his categorizing the Slavs, whether Poles, Russians, etc., as fundamentally "Alpine" in their origins, which he traces to the Carpathians. Among the Carpathian Slavs of relatively recent historical times--the Ruthenians (or "Rusyns") or some ethnic Poles living in the area--there is a notable Alpine presence; however, the physical traits of Slavic speakers there have little to do with the remote origins of the Slavs and their ancestral language. Today, there is little doubt that, along with the bearers of related Indo-European language families, such as Keltic, Germanic, Italic, or Indo-Aryan, the origin of the Slavs was further east--between the Black and Caspian Seas.

While contemporary studies cast doubt that they were Nordic in the blond sense, these very early Indo-Europeans could have been Mediterraneans in transition to Nordics based on developing depigmentation. In Stoddard's own day--as he should have been aware--anthropological writers emphasized the Nordic traits of all early bearers of Indo-European languages, to include the original Slavs. Adding more refinement, Coon in The Races of Europe (1939) concluded that Nordics were a subset of Mediterraneans who had experienced a loss of pigmentation based on Darwinian selection for a climate with reduced sunlight. For reasons not yet fully explainable, Russian and Polish populations, Coon argued later, underwent a reduction of head length. One factor could have been admixture with the Alpine or other round-headed inhabitants of Europe, who predated or moved in with the Slavs, but a long- to round-head transition had occurred elsewhere in the old world.

In any case, Stoddard was determined to characterize Slavs as Alpines from the start, and to account for red or blond hair and the presence of Nordics in northern Poland and northwest Russia to sparser, earlier populations present throughout the region or to accretions or later infusions from outside the Slavic masses. Further, Eastern Europe, marked the beginning of a highway beyond the Urals--too insignificant to serve as a barrier--straight to the "Asiatics" of the Far East. Periodic inroads of Mongols, Turks, and Tatars sprinkled Asiatic blood throughout Europe's east, from north Russia to the Balkans.

Some of these strains were now present in mixture with the Slavs, but other Asians, set apart by faith, remained distinct. Such was the case of those Tatars converted to Islam, or the Ashkenazic Jews, who had made their home in the Polish Empire of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Stoddard here and elsewhere characterized the Jews of Poland and adjacent countries as containing a significant Mongoloid strain based on the conversion of the Khazars of southern Russia to Judaism circa 900 A.D. Stoddard shared this view at the time with Madison Grant and, although he found a variety of strains in Eastern European Jewry, he from time to time referred to Jews as "Asiatic" as a consequence. This "Khazar theory" has risen and fallen in acceptance with the years and currently is in decline based on DNA analyses.

The overall result of these mixtures within or adjacent to the Slavs created a complex and unstable social and political situation. Stoddard begins with a capsule summary of the revived nation of the Czechs and Slovaks. This new state, Czecho-Slovakia (a hyphen used in the 1920's and for 6 months after the later Munich Accord), which even today thrusts into the heart of Central Europe, Stoddard characterizes as Eastern European because the most direct access is via the east, less disrupted by mountains than the more extensive ranges in the far west of the country. The Czechs, originally almost purely Alpine, displaced the Nordic-Germanic peoples they encountered and over the centuries experienced a love-hate relationship with them. (Nordic admixture did take place, however, noticeable across class lines.) After welcoming a return of Germans to revive trade, the Czechs rose in rebellion against them, only to be defeated by the Habsburgs and fall under their sway for centuries. However, Czech nationalism returned in the 19th century, and Czech desertions en masse to the Allied forces in the Great War earned them warm support from the Allies and the ultimate reward of a state under their control.

Literally, it was a brittle country of minorities wrested from their homelands and governed by three-fifths of the total population, the Czechs and the Slovaks. There were more than 3 million Germans, most of them bristling with resentment at the Czechs for generations, since the latter's growing nationalism; equally discontented Hungarians, numbering approximately 800, 000; roughly half a million Ruthenians (mistakenly termed "Little Russians"); and an additional 600,000 "others." Worse still, the animosity between the "governing" Czechs and Slovaks threatened to shatter this fragile country, and turn it into a replica of the preceding Hapsburg Empire.

Why this discord at the top of the pyramid? "The chief differences between them," Stoddard found, "are that the Czechs are well-educated, prosperous, and open to modern ideas, whereas the Slovaks are mostly illiterate, poor, and intensely conservative [p. 179]." The more urbanized sophisticates looked down on their unwashed country brothers. Promises of Slovak autonomy proved hollow as the Czechs created a centralized state. Moreover, the tariffs of the new nation disrupted Slovakia's natural economic connection, based on geography, to Hungary. Stoddard recalled a Czech's response to Stoddard's recounting of Slovak complaints about their status: "Those Slovaks!...'Liberty' Indeed! The first thing they'd better do is to get de-loused! [ibid.]"

A calming influence, for the time being, were some very able leaders, in particular (Thomas) Masaryk and (Eduard) Benes. Stoddard commented very favorably on their skill and "statesman like common sense [p. 180]." Thus far they had guided the ship of state into comparative prosperity and tolerance, being far wiser than their followers and the average Czech politician whose petty chauvinism matched that of their counterparts in elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

In particular, Masaryk and Benes were a refreshing contrast to the leaders of resurrected Poland. As in the case of Portugal, where the 1926 revolution led to a measure of improvement, Stoddard missed the hopeful interval of the Sanjaca ("Sanitation"), the authoritative government heralded by the coup, same year and month, of Marshal Jozef Pilsudski. Pilsudski saw himself as the man of destiny who would end a chaotic state of affairs and restore a bit of order to his country and attempt to ease the tensions between Poles and the various minorities included within the borders of the reborn nation. But from the perspective of 1924, Stoddard found Polish domestic and foreign politics the way Pilsudski himself might have seen it: confused, divisive, and essentially emblematic of the inherent instability of Eastern Europe.

Once, in union with Lithuania, a brilliant empire, the Poland of the past degenerated into an anarchic "helpless hulk" with large numbers of discontented minorities--"alien" Germans and Russians, and "unassimilated" Jews [v. p 185]. As such it was a soft target for the partition that overtook it in the 18th century through the action of Prussia, the Hapsburg Empire, and Tsarist Russia.

The Allies of the Great War, and particularly France, had abetted an impending repeat performance. They had brought back into existence an enlarged nation, with agricultural and industrial potential, that might augur for a bright future. "Actually," Stoddard wrote, "her prospects are very far from bright [p. 188]." Within a few years of the Versailles settlement, Poland had fought with all its neighbors, leaving it without a single friend in the region and surrounded by enemies. In particular, her most powerful foes, Germany and Russia, would tolerate the challenge of Poland's existence "just so long as they have to--and not one moment longer [ibid]." The advent of both Sanjaca and the Third Reich lengthened the short fuse prophesied by Stoddard. For most of the 1930's Poland and the passionately anti-Versailles (and equally anti-Communist) Germany of Hitler buried the hatchet, with Soviet Russia standing more passively outside this German-Polish rapport. Hitler, with what he saw as more pressing goals, put German grievances toward Poland on the back burner.

On the eve of the Second World War, having effectively dismembered Czechoslovakia, Hitler returned to champion the cause of the German minority in Poland. And minority problems abounded from the beginning. Not only Germans (2.5 million), but many more Jews ( nearly 4 million), Ruthenians--he may have meant Ukrainians--(4 million), and other groups (estimated at 1.5 million), made only slightly ("a trifle") more than half of the country of 27 million actually authentic Roman Catholic Poles. Although, based on Stoddard's own figures, the proportion of actual Poles seemed somewhat higher, he was undoubtedly correct in assessing the situation that even Pilsudski could not really end: "None of these minorities like Polish rule, and the Poles are doing their best to make them like it still less....[p. 189]"

Next door to the unwieldy Polish state was the great mystery, Russia--"vast and incalcuable [p. 190]." One could expect many surprises from Russia, of which Bolshevism would not be the last. Although "the Alpine presence and Slavic speech" admixed in a disharmonic blend with some Nordic elements, remained constants in Russia, Russians admitted that their country was an enigma. For the time being, the adoption of an international communist system hostile to established Western institutions signaled that Russia was nearer to Asia than at any time before Peter the Great, who had imposed a Western facade over the legacy of the "Tatar Khans."

Stoddard's formulations concerning Russia and its heritage had more influence than might be imagined. The staunch German nationalist historical theorist and political critic Oswald Spengler, writing in The Hour of Decision (1934), found Russia, since the 1917 Revolution (and now under the control of Stalin), as having "removed its 'White' mask...and again become Asiatic with all its soul [op. cit., 108]." Fifteen years after the publication of the book, Winston Churchill, in an early broadcast, October 1, 1939, as First Lord of the Admiralty nearly one month after England entered upon a new war with Germany, included some memorable remarks about Russia:

" I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma....[ adding, in note of realism which is often overlooked] but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest. It cannot be in accordance with the interest of the safety of Russia that Germany should plant itself upon the shores of the Black Sea, or that it should overrun the Balkan States and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of south eastern Europe, That would be contrary to the historic life-interests of Russia."

v. http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/RusnEnig.html

For Soviet Russia, true to Stoddard's premonitions, had given the world one of its great surprises with the conclusion of a "Non-aggression Pact" with its ostensible bitter enemy, Hitler-Germany, literally weeks before. And Churchill perhaps anxiously looked toward a time when this Pact would lose its luster.

Finishing his set of sketches of contemporary European nations, Stoddard reviewed "The Balkan Flux." The first racial building blocks in the Balkan peninsula differed from Slavic Eastern Europe and paralleled those of the western Mediterranean, particularly Spain and Portugal. Initially, slender and dark-complected Mediterraneans created the pre-classical civilizations (Stoddard states, "prehistoric") of Crete and Mycenae; they were followed by a wave of Nordics, who ruled as masters over their predecessors in Homer's day, then mixing somewhat with them to produce the brilliant Hellas of the classic era. The immortal achievements of this Nordic-Mediterranean blending recalls earlier passages in the book praising the eventual success of this mixture in England. In Greece, however, the Mediterraneans of subsequent generations became debased with Levantine and Asiatic strains. The Balkans, after all, were much closer to Asia Minor, not continental Europe.

Stoddard emphasized geography as a determiner of events almost as much as race: in the case of the Balkans, the lay of a land broken into pockets by mountains undermined the unity that maintained greatness. The centers of culture in classic Greece were cities that quarreled in bloody combat with each other and left this tip of the Balkans open to foreign invaders, the Macedonians, Nordics just to the north, who made Greece a province of the great, but short-lived empire of Alexander the Great, and following the breakup of this world-wide edifice, the more mixed Romans, who succeeded in providing a period of "political unity and peace" for the entire region.

The eventual decline of Rome brought on a wave of barbaric invasions of various European and Asian races that obliterated classical civilization and introduced the Alpine Slavs as the predominant strain among the newcomers to the Balkans, with the exception of a Greek remnant that held out and maintained close connections to the Greek-speaking Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire centered in Constantinople. The subsequent history of the Balkans for several centuries was a series of conflicts between Slavs (notably the Slavicized Bulgarians--a cross of Alpine Slavs and Asiatic Finns and Turkic strains--and the Serbs) and the Byzantines for supremacy throughout the peninsula. Ultimately, both Byzantines, peninsular Greeks, and the Orthodox Slavs were swamped by a new flood moving into and beyond Anatolia--the Ottoman Turks. The Turks provided nothing of value in their long campaigns that subdued most of the Balkans, he averred, and with the centuries-long recession of the Turkish presence, the peoples of the area gradually regained their independence, as if Rip Van Winkles, awaking from a long slumber and smouldering anew with hatreds culminating in new wars in the early 20th century. The essential premise for understanding "the whole story": "The Balkan peoples are not 'young' as we are apt to think. They are very old....[p. 205]"

Stoddard had much to encapsulate in this quick sketch covering the Balkans from Cretan civilization to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the renewal of the Balkan peoples as independent states. His coverage of nearly 4,000 years has many deficiencies even from the standpoint of his own time, and our contemporary judgments stemming from recent historical research. If the Balkans, with the coming of the Slavs, became mainly Alpine, one wonders if geographical separation into tribes and clans due to topography would be the crucial factor creating warfare as a basic norm. Either the Alpine race was passive rather than warlike, as he taught, or it was not--or--geography was, after all, a more important determinant than race in human action. Alternatively, the Slavs and the other peoples of the peninsula, including some of the so-called Asiatic strains, had a more aggressive Nordic inheritance than Stoddard could admit.

Although Stoddard characterized Turkish dominion as mainly an Asiatic encampent on European soil, the Turks degrading the conquered non-Mohammedans--"destroying the best and strongest elements of the population" and dividing the increasingly downtrodden peasants (called Rayah--"cattle") from their upper classes who formed the bulk of the converts to the faith of the Prophet, this rather popular picture has its critics, especially with respect to the initial period of Ottoman rule. At first (v. Lecture 3 in the Swathmore College series on the Balkans http://staff.lib.msu.edu/sowards/balkan/ ), Ottoman rule had its attractions:

" [Conquered] Jews, Christians and Muslims worshiped the same God. Jews and Christians were penalized only partially for failing to accept God's most recent revelation through the prophet Mohammed. The Islamic conquerors tolerated the other two religions, at a time when toleration was rare in Europe. After the Frankish and Venetian sack of Byzantium in 1204, Orthodox Byzantine Greeks thought that Catholic Western Europeans were as bad or worse than the Turks. In the Ottoman administration, talented men of all faiths could fulfill at least limited roles. For peasants, the finality of Ottoman victory also meant an end to centuries of wars between Serbs, Bulgars, Byzantines and Crusaders, and thus offered stability. Ottoman taxes were lower than the taxes of the conquered Balkan Christian kingdoms."

With respect to the designation "Rayah," it more appropriately means "flock" to describe the various religious followings among the conquered peoples and not the stigmatizing "cattle."

The decline of the Ottoman Empire began gradually after the death of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1566, last of a long line of capable Sultans. Then came a turn for the worse with "a succession of nonentities," economic stagnation in the Empire after the Western European re-discovery and exploitation of the New World, growing hostility to non-Muslims, and increasing contempt for European culture and learning:

" In the new hard times, Muslims had better access to arms, political power, bribes and other ways to defend their interests. Corrupted courts allowed local landlords to rob their Christian peasants. The burden of bad times fell on non-Muslims, and the country broke into rival blocks...."

Where Stoddard strikes a hauntingly familiar note occurs in his description of the actions of the new Balkan states of Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania that emerged during the course of the 19th century: after whittling down the once great Turkish domain to a small European pocket around Adrianople in the First Balkan War of 1912, Greeks, Serbs, and Romanians marched on Bulgaria in the sequel of 1913 and humiliatingly reined in the this once rising star of the Balkans. The winning parties then began a process of "extirpation" in anticipation of another round of fighting. Extirpation, as described by Stoddard "consisted in the rooting out or forcible conversion of hostile minorities, thus attempting to make national lines correspond with political frontiers and to assure the fanatical loyalty of the whole future population within any given state border [p. 208]." Those who thought of the term "ethnic cleansing" as a horrifying new coinage during the Balkan conflict of the 1990's, or simply as an echo of the era of the Second World War, were hardly aware that it was a well-worn concept in the region.

Stoddard shared a timeless insight in his Balkans survey: hatchets among the Balkan peoples were seldom buried, just hidden for a spell, such as during the Serbian Royal hegemony in the "Jugoslavia" created after the Great War, and covered in the book, or the Titoist national Communist era which barely outlived the death of Josef Broz Tito in 1980, or the simmering tensions between Romanians and Hungarians in Transylvania, which resurfaced in the 1980's as nationalism re-emerged within the crumbling Soviet bloc in Europe.

Stoddard concludes his book by praising the immigration restrictions Congress had enacted in 1924 as a recognition that America must maintain its original Nordic white component, reinforced to be sure by more recent--and kindred--immigrants from Northern Europe, as predominant. These demographic controls reflected a scientific understanding of the problem of race that put aside false, illusory theories about the nature of the United States--particularly that it was a malleable, unfinished work in progress. Nations reflected their basic racial components, the mental traits of which were inherent and not fundamentally generated by the environment. The new knowledge of race, implementingthe ancient imperative "Know Thyself!," formed the basis of a new accord among peoples of Nordic ancestry, whether in the United States, the British Isles, or Scandinavia, where forward looking people were becoming aware of its principles. The possibility loomed of a thoughtful internationalism, rather than a narrow nationalism or irresponsible global meddling.

In forming a considered appraisal of this book, a return to his treatment of the Magyar Hungarians, the Poles and Russian Slavs, and the Balkan peoples allows us to distinguish an articulate publicist from a more disciplined inquirer into the problem of race. Towards Hungary, definitely a more exotically composite nation than France, Stoddard then and later provides every benefit of the doubt and is frequently given over to flattery. Why was this blend of Nordics and Alpines, supplemented by some traces of an Asiatic heritage, so superior to the Alpine-Nordic, Finnic, Tatar, and Mongol Russians and Poles or the "debased" Asiatic-Levantine stocks absorbed into the Balkan amalgam? Stoddard is ever at his crudest when he employs "Asiatic" in a usually derogatory or (rarely) complimentary fashion as it suits him.

As Baker points out in Race (p. 57), the boundary between Europe is Asia is rather artificial. There should be nothing negative or alien about the Levant, which during the Neolithic Era and subsequently, sent forth populations of farmers and cattle breeders--or later, copper and bronze workers--among them aquiline-nosed Dinarics--throughout southern Europe, but some as far as the British Isles or Central Europe. Moving further north, in, or at least close to, Asia, the Indo-European languages began their development, and Nordic or Nordic-like peoples disseminated them far and wide into Central and South Asia. Equestrian culture seems to have its roots in Central Asia, possibly a collaborative effort of early-Nordics and Mongols.

Stoddard could have been correct in equating more enduring parliamentary institutions and civil liberties with nearly homogeneous Nordic populations as they somehow moved away from their earlier warlike dispositions and became more intellectual. Yet Nordics, if particular character traits could be assigned to them on the basis of heredity, might have a tendency to devolve from their pugnacious-to-enlightened phase and become overly snobby, effete, and ultimately guilt-ridden and cringing. Their sense of obligation to others on the basis of some innate sense of supremacy--their "noblesse oblige"--could degenerate into a mania for suicide. The 21st century will provide further trials to test the mettle of this race and what veracity "Stoddarian" views might have long-term.

Amidst the backdrop of our contemporary culture, which is fast losing its historical sense and any feeling for disciplined scholarship, a careful study of Stoddard has the merit of impelling us to put OUR particular prejudices aside and take a better look at the first half of the 20th century. Stoddard was part of the New England elite of America, a man of privilege from a distinguished family with roots in 17th century Massachusetts. He was a Republican, a Progressive, and a racialist. He should challenge the currently fashionable nexus of Democrat and racism. He was not fully aware that he had better talents as a pundit, where he could get off his hobby-horse of race and utilize geography, economics, history, and other subjects that he thought less important. In his remarks about an inevitable change of events in Germany, however, he appears to have successfully integrated his simplistic anthropology with history to have predicted the advent of the Third Reich.